A cure for the Electoral College?

Arnold Barnett (left) is George Eastman Professor of Management Science at MIT's Sloan School of Management. Edward Kaplan (right) is Beach Professor of Management, professor of Medicine and professor of Engineering at Yale University. Both have written extensively about U.S. elections and the Electoral College.

Arnold Barnett (left) is George Eastman Professor of Management Science at MIT's Sloan School of Management. Edward Kaplan (right) is Beach Professor of Management, professor of Medicine and professor of Engineering at Yale University. Both have written extensively about U.S. elections and the Electoral College.

While the Electoral College caused little mischief in the 2008 election, it has often served as the fun-house mirror of American politics. Had one in 90 Ohioans voted differently in 2004, John Kerry would have won even though George W. Bush had a nationwide popular-vote margin of 3 million. Whatever happened in Florida in 2000, no one doubts that Al Gore won the national popular vote that year but lost the presidency. In 1984, the Electoral College rewarded Walter Mondale for getting 41 percent of popular votes by giving him 2 percent of electoral votes.

There are various proposals to alter or abolish the Electoral College, perhaps the most conspicuous being a scheme to move to a national popular vote through an agreement among states. The 21 small states that get extra strength in the Electoral College have shown little enthusiasm for this change. Indeed, the reform has passed thus far only in a few heavily Democratic states, which suggests that its prospects are limited.

There is, however, a revision of the present arrangements that might satisfy many different constituencies, and could conceivably be in place by 2012. A candidate's overall showing could be expressed as a percentage, and be an average of his or her showings in the 51 states (including the District of Columbia).

It would be not a simple average but rather a weighted one, the weights of which would be each state's present share of electoral votes. The candidate with the highest weighted-vote share would win the election.

What's a weighted average? We routinely encountered them in high school, when a teacher announced that the final exam counted as (say) 50 percent of the grade, the midterm exam as 30 percent and homework as 20 percent. We knew what that statement meant: If a student got 82 percent on the final exam, then 50 percent of 82 percent – 41 percent – would be credited toward his final score. If he got 90 percent on homework, then another 20 percent of 90 percent – 18 percent – would be added. The sum of the three contributions would be his final score.

Under the proposed system, California – with 55 electoral votes out of 538, which is 10.2 percent of the total – would have its popular-vote outcome weighted by 10.2 percent. Outcomes in the eight small states, which each have three electoral votes, would be weighted by 3/538 – 0.6 percent. An average state would have a weight of about 2 percent. Thus, the popular-vote result in California would count five times as much as the result in a mid-sized state, while the smaller states would retain the “boost” the Electoral College now gives them.

This weighted-average scheme might not immediately seem exciting, but it achieves zest when we realize what it would accomplish. As we argued in the American Statistical Association's Chance magazine, its advantages include:

Given recent voting patterns, it would increase rather than decrease the role of smaller states as a group.